The Eyes of a King (14 page)

“It was all right to come here without Maria, wasn’t it?” said Stirling.

“Yes. I mean, we’ve seen it before.”

“But I didn’t remember it as beautiful as this.”

“She will not mind. The hills are different when you’re in them, and we won’t go into them until Saturday.”

“Are we going to Aldebaran’s grave, then?” asked Stirling. “I think we should go before it gets late. If you still want to.”

I rose from the wall, where I had been leaning, and we turned to walk toward the graveyard.

I was watching the water flowing past us when Stirling
jogged my arm. “What?” I asked, looking up. The door of one of the houses slammed shut ahead of us, and looking to the sound, I saw a familiar figure jogging down the steps.

“It is Sergeant Markey,” I said.

“Yes. Can you believe he lives here?” said Stirling.

“Oh, I can well believe it.”

“He is coming this way,” said Stirling through the side of his mouth.

Sergeant Markey marched briskly toward us, and when he looked as if he recognized us, Stirling said politely, “Good afternoon, sir.” We both nodded to him. He gave the briefest hint of a nod, so small that we could have imagined it, and quickened his pace as he passed us, looking away.

“How impolite!” said Stirling in mock indignation when he had passed. And then he said again, “Can you believe he lives here?”

“I always assumed that he was poor, for some reason.”

“Me also. Most of the teachers aren’t rich.”

“Well, they’re not this rich. That’s probably why he’s so mean and irritable at school. He probably can’t bear to be away from his perfect house with its perfect street and its perfect view. He probably can’t bear to see all the ugly streets and shabby kids when he’s used to this.”

“You shouldn’t be jealous, Leo.”

“I’m not jealous. I’m just saying that it explains a lot.”

The street sloped shallowly downward. Soon we saw that there was a dead end ahead, cut off after a house by railings and then a sheer drop, and we turned off to the right.

As we walked south we reached a street I remembered. We were out of the wealthy area, without having noticed where it had ended, and back among the familiar drab houses. We had
to walk slowly, jarring our legs, this road was so steep. At the school I used to go to when I was a little boy, before the military schools were opened, they had taught us that the streets here sloped so sharply because this was the point where, thousands of years ago, the volcanic rock had slumped. I told Stirling that as we walked.

At the bottom of the street was the huge building of Zenithar Armaments. I think it used to be a hospital. There was a triangular space of mud in front of it, gouged with the tracks of many heavy carts. “Left here,” I said. Industrious metallic sounds seeped out from it as we passed. Not long after they had died away behind us, we reached the bridge.

There were five bridges from Kalitzstad. Lucien renamed four when he took over: the North, South, Northwest, and Southwest bridges. The one that we came to now remained the Victoire Bridge, named after the man who designed it; it was the only name that had not had royal connotations. It was the bridge that Lucien’s troops entered the city by when they took power.

This bridge had stood for over two hundred years, but I still wondered if it was safe as we crossed it. There was so much empty air between the bridge and the water. The old saying used to go that the city was built on willpower alone, because of the long tradition of training in magic here, and because of that gravity-defying bridge, and the castle on its rock, and the harbor that was hollowed out of the west side of the island, an enormous cave under the edge of the city.

We entered the graveyard through the stone archway at the end of the bridge and were instantly among the graves. Most on the perimeter were new, sunk from the settling of the earth or
mounded up still too high, and marked only with small wooden crosses. A short way to our left was an empty grave, newly dug. Stirling glanced at it as we passed.

The graves were arranged traditionally, in circles. In the center of the middle circle, a long way away from where we stood now, there was a large monument—a stone cross with the figure of Christ on it, surrounded by a circle of trees. Nearest to it were the graves of the royal family, going back about four centuries, and a lot of empty grass, which had been left for the rest of them for a long time to come. It would have been strange to be a young prince or princess in those days and walk up here and see, to the nearest foot or two, where you would lie until you returned to dust.

“I can’t remember where the grave is,” Stirling said. “It’s all changed.”

“I know it was over this way,” I said, weaving in and out of the headstones. I glanced at the nearest one. “A long way further in. These are only dated about a year ago.”

“I think it was in that direction,” Stirling said, pointing.

“Here, we are getting close. Read the dates.”

“I can’t.”

“I forgot. I will find it; we are near to it now.” We were about fifteen rings in toward the center. “It’s in this circle, for sure,” I told Stirling. “It’s around here.” He jogged over, and we both peered at the headstones. It was like a macabre sort of treasure hunt, and we were taking a strange delight in it.

“Is this it?” He pointed.

I looked. “Yes, I think so.”

“A-L-D …,” he spelled. I let him. “A-L-D-E-B-A-R-A-N. Aldebaran, that says. It is his grave.”

I
t was an ordinary cross, blotched with mustard-colored lichen, bearing only his name and the dates of his birth and death. “How old does that say he lived to?” asked Stirling.

I worked it out. “Sixty.”

“Younger than Grandmother,” said Stirling. “So how old is he now?”

“He would have been seventy.”

“Would have been? If he was alive, you mean?” He looked at me steadily. “I still think he is.”

“Perhaps.” I shrugged.

Stirling began to stamp on the grave. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Testing if I can hear a coffin echoing.”

“How would you know if coffins echo? And it would have rotted by now.”

“Oh.” He stopped stamping.

Now that we were here, it seemed stupid. How would we ever know if the grave was real just by looking at it or stamping on it? Or even digging it up? If people want to lie, they can lie, and you never know if they’re telling the truth.

“Do you know what?” Stirling said, casting his eyes about the graveyard.

“No, what?”

“Their heads are far apart, but their feet are all nearly touching.”

“Whose?”

“The bodies in the graves. That’s the problem with putting them in a circle.”

“Stirling! What a thing to think of! I must be a bad influence on you!”

“You sound like Grandmother!” he told me, and I laughed but hushed quickly. It was like laughing in a church. Even if you are quite alone, the spirits in the air tell you that you should not do it. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” he said. “They’re not really here.”

An urgent breeze snagged in the branches of the trees. The sun had lost its warmth without our noticing it, and the rays were casting long shadows behind the gravestones. The dark stone angels on the royal graves twitched. “Come on,” I told Stirling, shivering. “Let’s go home.”

“Are you scared?” he asked me.

“No—just cold. Come, we should be getting back.”

He followed me in and out of the gravestones. But before we reached the gateway, a figure emerged through it toward us—a somber, cloaked figure.

It was a priest. Behind him came four men bearing a small coffin—a child’s—about the height of Stirling. A young couple pressed close behind it, and a small family group a little way behind them. The man was wearing a soldier’s uniform. They were both crying and made no attempt to hide it. There should have been no one here to see.

I stood still, guilty because my laughter was still fading from the air, and Stirling stopped beside me. The people went and gathered around that open grave, and as soon as we could, we slipped past them toward the bridge. As we went, the man broke away from the group and staggered back to the gateway. He leaned there as though he could not support himself,
sobbing openly, his hands over his face. Stirling glanced at me, and we edged past him. He did not even look up.

We walked back in silence. The child must have died from some infectious illness; that was the reason for burial so late in the day. It was the tradition to bury people in the morning, so that they would rise with the sun. But it was the law to bury people after five o’clock and before sunrise if they had died of an infectious disease. Some people thought that just before dawn was closer to sunrise. Some people thought that the last light of the afternoon was. But the thing is neither of them is actually sunrise.

I had half expected Grandmother to be angry that we were late back, but she was not. We told her we had been for a walk, and she did not question it. “I’m glad that you were not kept in after school again” was all she said. Then she and Stirling went out to church.

I could not settle to anything. I wandered around the apartment, thinking about Aldebaran’s grave and whether it could be fake, as Stirling said. It had looked the same as all the others. Just the fact that he had a gravestone had always made me believe that he was dead for certain. But I was not certain anymore.

I began looking for that black book. Several days had passed since the last writing had appeared, and I wanted to check it again. I thought I had put it back in the windowsill chest, but it was not there. I searched the room. I found it eventually, under the mattress on my bed. That was strange, because I knew I had not put it there. And when I opened it, there was more writing in it.

I was less unnerved by the book than I had been at first, but I still hesitated before reading it. Not only was writing appearing in it, someone was moving it too. But what harm could it do just to read the next section? I flipped the next blank pages over, found the writing and began before I could change my mind.

“F
ield,” said Raymond, looking up from his newspaper. He found it increasingly hard to read, but he could make out most of the headlines. “Field, you know that gardening is not the butler’s job.”

“Sorry, sir,” said the butler, wiping the lawn mower oil from his hands. “The grass needed cutting.”

“How many times have I had to tell you, Field?” said Raymond. “You needn’t work so hard. You aren’t a slave.”

“It is no trouble, sir. Hard work is good for me.”

Several years had passed, and the butler had not aged. “Maybe that’s true,” said Raymond, chuckling.

“Well, I have always been accustomed to it.”

“I suppose the army was very tough physical work.”

“The army? Yes, of course.”

“I would not have managed,” said Raymond. “I’ve never been healthy. Look at me now: I’m barely seventy and I’m at death’s door.”

“I wouldn’t say that, sir. A heart attack takes some getting over, but I would not say you are at … death’s door, as you put it.” But Raymond shook his head.

The butler knelt and lit the fire. The swords, in their cases,
glimmered in the falling dusk. “Field, would you pass me the envelope from the top drawer of my desk?” Raymond said then. “The brown one.”

The butler fetched the envelope and handed it to him. “I’ve asked my lawyers to come by this evening,” Raymond said, taking out a few papers. “I needed to set some things in order.” At that moment the doorbell rang. “Show them in, Field, if you will. You don’t need to stay. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Very good, sir.”

As soon as the butler reached his room, he went to the cupboard. He got the book out, sighing in exasperation when he saw that there was still no more writing than his own unanswered messages. He began scrawling into it furiously, the ink spurting sharply from the pen with the force that he exerted on the nib.
The twentieth of August, in the twelfth year of the reign of King Cassius II
, he wrote.
Talitha.

I started and held the book closer to my eyes, reading that one name. Talitha—I had not misread it; that was what it said. Talitha, Lucien’s closest advisor, the one who had killed the king and the queen and exiled Aldebaran and the prince. This man was not a stranger after all. And the date he had written—the twentieth of August in the twelfth year of the reign of King Cassius II—that date was three days before the Liberation. I read on quickly.